Darkmoon Faire: Chicago Recap Part 1

The final major event before U.S. Nationals is out of the way and we are now in the home stretch with the biggest event yet fast approaching. But before we begin preparing in earnest and looking ahead to GenCon, we have to look back at this past weekend's results.

Individual performances.

The first thing I want to do is take a moment to look at some of the top individual performances we've seen in the game so far. First of all, congratulations to Brad Watson on winning the main event. But there are a few other individuals who deserve some praise as well. Everyone has heard about Chris McMurry and his second consecutive top 8 appearance but for some reason the other player, Matt Spreadbury, who also finished top 8 at both Austin and Chicago isn't getting the same amount of love. Both of these players showed an incredible amount of skill (and probably a little bit of luck) in making their second straight top 8.

Dan Clark pulled a Charles MacArthur and won both the Gadzetzan Challenge Friday and the iPod draft on Sunday. That's two DF's in the U.S. and the Friday winner has also won Sunday in both.

Speaking of Charles MacArthur's Limited sweep in Austin, the top-ranked Limited player in the world was back in the top 8 this time around. Unfortunately for Charles, Tim Batow was able to get his revenge for losing in the finals of the Austin Gadzetzan and took Charles out in the quarterfinals here. Still, Charles is a force of nature in limited and will be a player to watch on Day 2 of Nationals.

And finally, Tim Batow was coming off of a stellar weekend in Austin with the Dream Machine Championship and the second place in the Gadzetzan. While he was no doubt disappointed in his finish in Chicago's Dream Machine event, he found his way back to the finals of the Gadzetzan again only to lose to the person who would sweep the weekend again. His second Gadzetzan finals plus his Dream Machine win show that Tim may very well be the most well-rounded player in the game right now.

Non metagame-related notes

I think the single thing that impressed me most about this tournament was the attendence. With Regionals attendence numbers starting to slide (more on this in a moment) combined with the relatively low attendence of Darkmoon Faire Austin, I wasn't sure what to expect from the numbers in Chicago. While all reports say WoW is still selling very well, the tournament numbers have been in decline since the early Regionals, and to me at least, Chicago would be a nice signal as to the overall health of not only the game, but Organized Play as well.

Well, the numbers didn't disappoint at all. 120 players showed up for the Gadzetzan Challenge on Friday which was shocking to me for several reasons. For one, it started on Friday morning meaning that people coming in from out of town would generally have had to come in on Thursday night. Friday morning events that are not the main event of the weekend, historically have lower turnouts than the same tournament would have had on Saturday morning. It was also sealed deck. For some reason, limited formats in this game seem to be less popular than any other game I've played, so I wasn't expecting a big turnout for the Limited events.

The Dream Machine Championship brought in almost 170 players, which was almost twice what we saw in Austin. While there are things that point to a bigger turnout such as Chicago being a significantly larger city than Austin and the trip for out-of-towners being a lot cheaper, the dwindling Regionals numbers said that maybe there wouldn't be many more in Chicago than Austin. Luckily, that idea was wrong. Hopefully we can continue to see the same healthy growth in future Darkmoon Faires.

The last event of note was the iPod draft. While I haven't seen how many people entered, I did read that they were only allowing 64 players to register and that there was a bit of a scramble to secure your slot. Whether this was true I have no idea, but if it is that's pretty amazing to me. At Austin, there were a ton of people there who didn't play in the Dream Machine tournament, so it's conceivable there were as many as 350 people at the Faire. Anyone who was there, I would love to hear an estimate on how many people actually attended the Faire.

Before I move on, I do want to talk about Regionals attendence and why I think the numbers are slipping. To me it's pretty simple. There are too many invitations to a once a year event. With 4 invites at every Regionals and so many Regionals taking place it's not that difficult to get qualified. Once you qualify there is no real reason to go to a Regionals unless it's just in your hometown or you REALLY want that Ony Hide Backpack. The closest Regionals to me are about 2 hours away in Dallas and/or Oklahoma City. If I weren't already qualified I would travel as much as 4 hours to play in a Regionals (maybe even more).

I know there are a lot of people who don't like it when I compare WoW to other card games, but for the sake of this argument I simply must. When you look at Magic and VS. they have several "seasons" per year. With each major event, there is a qualifier season attached to it. Each season lasts 2 or 3 months. When a new season starts everyone starts playing again. If they had some other sort of invitations going out now (to the UDE Invitational for example), I think you would see the numbers start going back up as players would have a reason to travel to the events. Or they could even do something like playing out the top 8 with the winner getting an invite to Worlds and the other top 3 getting their Nationals invites. I think this would also drive up attendence at Regionals as players who are already qualified would again have a reason to travel to the events that are further away than 15 minutes.

That's going to do it for today. Tomorrow, I'll talk about the actual decks from the tournament and what they mean to us. Metagame Madness will be back on Wednesday.